“Go fuck yourself, Laith,” Lin replied tartly. They were all exhausted, but the tension in Lin’s voice surprised Valyn.
“No other option, I suppose,” the flier replied, glancing down at his right hand with a shrug.
“Now that your whore is dead, you mean?” she demanded.
The smile froze on Laith’s face. “She wasn’t my whore.”
“Of course not. That’s the nice thing about borrowed gear—if it gets busted, it’s no skin off your nose. If Amie had been yours, maybe you would have taken better care of her.”
Valyn raised a hand to stop the words, but Laith stepped in close before he could speak. The flier’s normal genial humor had burned off like the oil from the sputtering lamp.
“I don’t know how I became the villain in this little tale,” he said, eyes bright, voice soft, “but don’t drag me into your guilt.”
“My guilt?” Lin sputtered.
“Oh, right,” the flier shot back. “I forgot. You only bought fruit from her. You never bought sex.” He held up his palms in mock surrender. “What’d you pay her? A few copper flames? Enough to put a decent meal on her table? Enough so she could stop whoring?”
Lin refused to respond, her face closed like a book.
“Before you come pointing your finger at me, why don’t you ask yourself what you did to make Amie’s life any better,” Laith demanded, eyes ablaze. Before Valyn could say anything to calm things down, the flier turned on his heel and stalked out.
For a long time after the door slammed, Valyn and Lin sat in the flickering shadows cast by the dying lamp. After a while she reached across the table, twining her fingers in his. He couldn’t see her face in the darkness, but he tightened his grip on her hand.
“I just can’t…,” she began, then fell silent.
Valyn wasn’t sure what she was going to say, but he felt the emotion, the deep, sick helplessness behind the words. It seemed impossible that someone could murder an innocent girl, could truss her up like a slaughtered pig for the bleeding, all within sight of the Eyrie. Not only had the Kettral failed to save her, it looked like one of Valyn’s brothers or sisters in black was responsible for the killing.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said softly, trying to convince himself as much as Ha Lin. “We will.”
She slid over onto the bench beside him, and for a while the two sat side by side, hands entwined, bodies separate. Valyn could feel the warmth of her, but she kept apart, rigid in the darkness.
“There’s something else,” she said finally. “I found Balendin outside the barracks. Or … he found me.”
Valyn tensed, but Lin went on before he could respond.
“It was strange. He seemed nervous, almost frightened. Said he wanted to tell me something about Sami Yurl.”
“Yurl?” Valyn asked, baffled. “What was it?”
“That’s the thing. He wouldn’t say. Told me it was something I had to see, but that it was important.”
Valyn frowned. “I don’t like it.”
“What’s to like? Still, if he knows something about Yurl, something incriminating … Whoever killed Amie didn’t necessarily do it alone.”
“Yurl and Annick?” Valyn tried to make sense of the unlikely pair. Sami Yurl had his own cadre of nasty followers among the cadets, but the sniper had never been among them.
“If Balendin discovered something like that,” Lin pressed, “a murder—”
“He’d go straight to command.”
“Unless there’s a reason he can’t.”
Valyn puffed out a deep breath. He was weary, he realized, weary beyond the simple, honest exhaustion that came with a long month of training. The constant searching, guessing, and second-guessing, the glancing over the shoulder, the doubting and distrust were wearing him to a blunt edge. If one apple was rotten, you had to assume they all were, but that was a good way to starve.
“All right,” he said, knuckling his eyes, “but why would he come to you?”
“Maybe he knows we found Amie’s body. And he knows I’m more likely to listen than you are.”
Valyn snorted. “That’s debatable. You’ve got a shorter wick than I do when it comes to that temper of yours.”
“Maybe he just hates me a little bit less. You have a way of attracting … resentment.”
“So after all these years as Yurl’s minion, he wants to make nice? Wants to quit the atrep’s son and make friends with us?”
“Maybe,” Lin replied. “Pounding cadets in the ring is one thing. Hunting a whore and cutting her to pieces in an attic is something else. Maybe Balendin does have some decency.” Her tone suggested she didn’t find that very likely.
Decency. It was a tricky word for men and women trained to stab people in the back.
“Then we’ll both go see what he’s got to show you,” Valyn concluded. “If he can show it to one person, he can show it to two. I’ll promise to listen.”
“No,” Lin said. “It’s tomorrow morning. During your sniper test.”
Valyn cursed. “Well, tell him we can’t see it in the morning.”
“I don’t think it’s a thing,” Lin replied. “I think it’s an event. He wants me to see Yurl do something.”
Valyn clenched, then unclenched his fist.
“Where?” he asked, the question bitter in his mouth. He didn’t trust Balendin, didn’t trust this sudden crisis of conscience. For eight years, the leach had baited and battered just about every cadet on the Islands aside from Sami Yurl and his coterie. Where there was room to cheat, he cheated. Where there was space to lie, he lied. The idea of Lin going off with him somewhere in order to watch some secret event made Valyn’s stomach tighten. Of course, the blade cut both ways. If Balendin was treacherous, he could betray Yurl as easily as anyone else.
“Where?” he asked again.
“The west bluffs.”
The west bluffs comprised the sere, broken terrain toward the northwest corner of the island: some scrub, some thorns, and a good view out over the center of Qarsh. There were a few nesting seabirds on the ocean side, and a handful of interesting shells dropped by the gulls up on the cliffs. That was about it.
“What could he possibly want to show you up there?”
“That,” Lin replied, exasperation creeping into her voice, “is what I’m going to find out. Don’t worry, Val,” she added, softening her tone and squeezing his hand. “I’ll bring my real blades, and I’ll be careful.”
Valyn blew out a slow breath. “You’re just about a mile from the sniper test, up there,” he said. The thought calmed him somewhat, and he realized he’d half-expected Lin to tell him the meeting was in an abandoned house over on Hook. It didn’t make any real difference, of course. Something could go wrong up on the bluffs as well as in a cramped garret, but somehow the fact that Lin would still be on Qarsh, that she would be, in fact, only a few minutes’ hard run from the sniper range itself, helped his stomach to relax.
“All right,” he said finally. “’Shael knows I don’t trust that bastard, but it’s not like you’re a child.” She hadn’t moved her hand from his, and he found himself suddenly aware of its weight, of the gentle pressure of her callused fingers. They were alone in the hall, had been since Laith left, and for the first time since she had joined him on the bench he looked over at her, trying to make out the slender lines of her face in the darkness. “I’m just frightened for you,” he concluded quietly. There was more to say, a lot more, but he didn’t have the words.
Lin considered him for what seemed like a long time. Then, with no warning, she leaned over to press her lips against his. Her kiss was warm, and rough, and soft all at the same time. Valyn had bedded women before, but only whores over on Hook, and the experience had been somewhat uninspiring. This … this was something altogether different. After what seemed like a very long time, Lin pulled away.
“I’m sorry, I … I shouldn’t have done that.”
“You shouldn’t have had to,” Valyn replied, baffled but suddenly happy, his weariness stripped away, at least for the moment. “I should have done it a long time ago.”
Lin grinned, then stood and cuffed him lightly on the cheek. “I’ll see what Balendin has to show me. You just try not to let Annick mess up that fine face of yours too badly in tomorrow’s test.”
Before Valyn could respond, she turned on her heel. He was still smiling when the door closed behind her. She couldn’t be his, of course, not in any of the traditional ways. Kettral never married, and the few clandestine relationships that took place on the Islands were carefully concealed, buried deep enough that they would never interfere with training or war. Still, there was a possible life, a future, in which they flew on the same Wing, worked with each other every day, even grew old alongside each other, provided neither of them took an arrow in the back. It wasn’t much, but for a little while, Valyn let himself drift with the fantasy.
Then the bell rang for third watch, jolting him from his thoughts, and the darkness and silence settled down again, heavy as the water that had almost drowned him just days earlier.